Adjectives

This chapter delimits and describes the category ‘Adjective’ in the main Romance languages (Catalan, French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese and Spanish). Section 1 sets out to delimit the category. Importantly, traditional criteria of adjectivehood like agreement and gradability fail to delimit the category, in that many adjectives are invariable and do not take degree markers. Syntactic dependence is a good criterion of adjectivity, but in order to be effective, it has to be related to the attributive position (distributional criterion), which is the only syntactic position accommodating all adjectives. This hypothesis is corroborated in Section 2, which deals more specifically with the attributive position. It describes the semantics of adjectival modification and discusses important issues like the relative position of the adjective in the noun phrase, and the difference between adjectives and determiners. Section 3 discusses the predicative position and its relationship with Qualification, or the prototypical function of the category.